The lost poem

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Dugald Williamson

It had a sense of presence,
of solidarity in light’s embrace,
despite the blind-folding, the winding drive,
the tuning-up of crowded Tehran streets
dissonant in cupped glass; then voices only,
interrogation, an art-form of power
where everything fits, as in paranoia;
but nothing was lost on you.
In what was planted or removed that night,
loyalty travelled in a few straight lines
on the crystalline wedlock of light
in the mosaics of dawn in Esfahan,
the only words a faithful man
could bring himself to write.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Inheritance

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Christian Ryan Ram Malli

Often, it’s April in my chest, a tremor caught
just before I can say: fuck you
for every little thing you couldn’t do, for the sound
of jars losing their porcelain history on the floor,
the air, charged with your breath
and my breathlessness.
Rage is your only lullaby, and eventually I learned
all of the words. I can’t touch a man without
vibrating, the constant yearning
to knuckle things out of order that you swore
was love. No sense of tomorrow.
Once, in a room with all the noise
of an ailing city, I felt my own heart,
something alive inside me,
threatening to abandon the body that treated
it so poorly. Deep in the vein
of nowhere, I like to think there is a flash
stunning enough to blind me. That I can reach
to find an arm, knowing I can trust what I can touch.
No longer April, and the monsoons
would have reclaimed everything;
every sun that vanished after you,
the gaps in my palms every night I tried
to reach for yours,
and all of your sad wind.
Even us and the equal parts we hate the world.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Jennifer Nguyen has a secret, very sexy fetish

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Jennifer Nguyen
Jennifer Nguyen moves backwards in order to go forward. She cries frequently in order to cry less. Her work has been ingested by people she will never meet but nevertheless hope they were nourished. If you catch her doing nothing, actually, she is very busy, doing nothing, which, in her experience is the greatest something. And, if you think that last sentence was nonsense, that’s because it’s all nonsense.

+

Jennifer Nguyen is currently hardly working on her next book of poems, titled, ‘Have you gotten a real job yet?’ to which she thought nothing is as real a job as writing poetry, except maybe, literally anything else. The only logical conclusion she has to the question then, is, nothing and everything is real.

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Jennifer Nguyen is having her 444th existential crisis. If you know what the hell is going on in this reality please contact her at: youdaredmetoreadmegatronxreaderfanfic@soidid.com

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Jennifer Nguyen didn’t want to make this all about her so instead she will make some of this about bread. Blueberry bagels. Sourdough with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Milk bread. Melon bread. Twin sausage buns. Melon bread (again). Garlic bread. Garlic bread with cream cheese.

… — once, someone made her actual garlic bread with actual garlic they actually peeled and diced in real life, like, right in front of her. Needless to say, the whole experience changed her and now her only god is bread.

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Jennifer Nguyen is the author of countless drafts of poems based on dreams that likely no one will ever read, due to her lack of motivation to edit them. Some were so horrifying it made her smile. Others so full of unconditional love it made her sick with bliss.

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Jennifer Nguyen believes you can become anyone and anything you want to be so long as you believe it enough. For example: Jennifer Nguyen believes you can become anyone and anything you want to be so long as you believe it enough.

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Jennifer Nguyen has a secret, very sexy fetish that the professional bio will not only die out and become redundant but be replaced by something that makes your body react violently as soon as you read it, like a snort of laughter that ejects snot, or a long, chest filling howl to the moon.

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Jennifer Nguyen recently sold her second collection of poems in a hot two-way auction where soju was guzzled down recklessly, and lips were pressed on lips. There, she said to her love, they don’t know her just because they’ve read her work. Only her most unpublishable drafts have that privilege.

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Jennifer Nguyen is trying to (for the first time) achieve 100% true completion in Stardew Valley, on what is now her fourth or fifth save file. Please do not engage with her unless it is to bring her snacks (bread), where she will thank you by giving you a short tour of her farm and asking you: ‘It’s nice, right?’.

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Jennifer Nguyen is really, really sick of writing out her name like this, so from now on will go by a small image of bread. Not the bread emoji but one of those cute pastel pixel breads you put as your cursor for your Myspace page.

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The artist formerly known as Jennifer Nguyen asks that you do not refer to The artist formerly known as Jennifer Nguyen as ‘The artist formerly known as Jennifer Nguyen’.

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[Pixel Image of Bread] recognises the opaque nonsense of everything you’ve just read and does not apologise for wasting time, as, we have all the time in the world. [Pixel Image of Bread] promises if you peel back the layers you will find a fleshy white banana that will allow you to transcend the oppressiveness of time and space, but only when eaten through the heart and not the mouth. If the nonsense is still opaque then it was not the right time and it might be someday but for now, it was fun and for [Pixel Image of Bread], it is all that really matters.
Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Switching Stages

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Joseph Jude

I thank you for this scene
Of your mother in a lounge room,

Your father in a garden and your brother
Who refuses to share his mind

But I should explain, at least, that your
Mother, from your story, has not flopped

Into a chair, in a room in your house
But in mine; and your father, see,

I have him here, looking out
Across a lawn, in our backyard.

Well, he does not notice your brother,
Your father, but we have this link,

Your brother and I, for he has
Known me, all of his life.

Now I ask, if my story is taking place
In your home — if you have marbled

My mother, in rooms which I have
Never seen before;

And so, is my father, in your patio
Sending out his cigarette-smoke-signals

And my brother, if you have him
Do you have that link, for he has known you

all of
your life.

I ask, if in these reborn scenes,

If disbelief
is what we share?

I have you next
to your mother,

In a haze, a wool of grief.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

First Reading

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Andy Kissane

We begin rehearsals in a freezing warehouse
that was once a factory reverberating with the hum
and clanking of shuttle looms and the numbing
routine of days that chilled down into the soul,
that accumulated a tally of impoverished hours
spent tending a thread, a line of cotton, a line
of wool, all spooling and unspooling without end.
How privileged I am to be working at what I love,
to be collaborating with four men and five women
on a project that is destined for applause. I am
not one for speeches and group improvisations.
I will not impose some predetermined method
on the material. Instead, we sit around the table
and read the play. The lilt, grain and timbre
of their voices fills the room. There is no showing off,
no competition, simply the pleasure of imagining it
all unfold, as if a parachute is spread between us
ready to catch whatever shines and bounce it past our faces
while we watch it wobble, ricochet and spin. There is
not much to do but immerse myself in the listening.
And when Thao leaves her daughter, Mai, to go south
during the war, I suddenly see my father standing
next to my mother on the steps of the Saigon Opera House,
I see him buying a lottery ticket from a man with an open
suitcase and sitting down at a wedding feast with his friends—
all these young men smiling over bowls of rice. I must admit
that I’m hoping to find my father, or the ghost of my father,
that I long to be lifted up and swung through the air again,
to be wrapped up in his arms, to feel his cheek pressing
against mine, not the way he used to greet me, but now,
in this warehouse, in the pulse of this reading, to have
and hold more than the day when we last saw him,
when along with his ARVN comrades he shed
his uniform and abandoned his army boots,
leaving them unlaced and empty on a once frantic street.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Consequences at Fibonacci Cemetery

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Ian Reid

Take
your
future
for a stroll
along tombstone lane.
Droll: epitaphs alone survive.

As
you
stand on
a tilted
slab, whoosh! — out spins a
speedy bird from the hollow grave.

On
the
shadow
side, recessed,
there’s a small door with
a keyhole, but the key is lost.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

ludic (II)

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Stu Hatton

The game seemed a hustling object, a whatever.

Who was adjudicating? Perhaps the field.

The whole mob performance, pleading the point. Our heads were just to sit there
content.

A carnage never free from chance. Money’s short-lived hum, a pretence.

The realm of stakes we didn’t want. Cameras, floodlights convince. The fray ever
emptyhanded.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Firm Ice: Three Fragments of Sophokles

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Phillip Dupesovski

Translator’s Note

You are the translator.

Pages: 1 2 3 4
Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

__LOCKDOWN__ Protocol

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Tim Busuttil

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Hades

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Jonno Révanche

In time we will escape the citadel.
In time comes the white outline set of an
overlay from the bottom up,
in time drapery over the doorway
firing, squeezing the possibility
of love into pulp,
the view to certain boons becoming clear;
the bluff will pass.
The young prince chooses violence,
surveys his kingdom
all at once
and chooses to instigate
wine and former surrogacy.
The young prince finds that home
communicates the site of the wound,
(in comedic, ever-spiralling
continuity.)
There is the pageboy again
greeting you as you emerge.
There is the blowout as you challenge
familial ends.
The young prince resists the prophecies both of Freud and
Persephone, Antigone, rejecting frauds – death to any other
mother.
I too choose to run, sometimes with ease, jealousy, or availability,
sometimes not; away,
veering from discomfort, of “knowing”, that once separate energy is unspooling,
it collects its own conscience,
though still not ergonomic. To turn and face the gates of Tartarus, again,
endlessly, maybe? or Louise Bourgeois saying “I have been
to hell and back, and let me tell you,
it was wonderful” and Caroline Polachek,
“this is gonna be torture
before it’s sublime,”
or the culmination of a year, the growth
that comes from tears, and a movement
taking place in the mid-section,
the spilling of blood as
the Gorgon decides its uses,
or was this planned?
How tragic, to just
be a spinning top.
A father pins you down by force,
the other pins you down with grace.
or Oprah saying “the vultures are waiting to
pick your bones,” or never catching a glimpse
of something inside.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Gamespace

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

1.

You, again. Waiting for Paradise, Godot, the new iOS. Marker in the flow. Stream yourself into this. A poem enters, plump with gamespace. Because what is a line if not trajectory. You are moving toward something. If the poem had lashes, it would bat them. Diamond pitch of voice. Ball as round as mouth inviting the fourth vowel of surprise. The poem leans in, wants you to give breath to the static. What do you do?

To read the poem, go to 4. To not read the poem, go to 8.

2.

You are being reconfigured. Here, papyrus: choose an avatar. Rehearse life. Reality is not yet real.i An absolute atopia. Local area network of digital space. Pixel persona. Gamespace is a metaphor for a stacked map: every deed sold off. Your body is a capital I, third vowel of seeing. Morph into Kafkaesque. Your face is changing. Do you recognise yourself anymore?

If you do, go to 6. If you don’t, go to 9.

3.ii

Subroutine: you can only reach here via die roll. Or endnote. Turn story into navigation. Database as description. Topology of wireless infrastructure. Each threshold is clearly marked. Controller of joy, stick. An a log. The difference between temporalized space and how the digital spatializes time are the tender buttons. A form of food: for the finger there are points, tipping horizon. Here, Gertrude is a hologram. You are too: you have no choice in this matter.

Go to 2.

4.

The poem reads you instead. Reads you: to filth; your rites; as if it wrote you. Lenin in the streets / Dostoyevsky in the sheets.iii An algorithm of sequenced archives: library as an operating system, dragging. Atomic, the elements construct gamespace. The poem samples you, records an imprint. It is there, just up above your eyes. You are being colonised. Reduce stamina by millennia. Ask yourself: is the poem spam, or am I?

If the poem is spam, go to 7. If you are spam, go to 2.

5.

Chance is something we take. There is no prescription for luck. Only superstition. Three gold coins. Knock on wood. A pinch of salt. Looking back to find it there. Windfall. Wind theft. Seizing opportunity as it withers your grip. Pasteur’s prepared mind. The caution. The optimism. The faith of four leaves and greener pastures. Grab die: roll for it.

If you roll an even number, go to either 8. If you roll an odd number, go to 3.

6.

Your data is dogecoin. Which is to say: you are increasing in value with every click. The further you unravel into digital space, the more of you they can mine. They: substitute corporate name here. Incorporate yourself into stream. Multiply identity. Clone for the company. Reminder: a soul only has value to you. And The Devil. Unless the latter is slain by Montero. Take a poll.

To go to 8, go to 8. To go to 3, first go to 5.

7.

Hello, this is The United Nations Public Information Office. Beloved, we have found a resolution solution regarding your compensation payment. You can make millions from this wealth loophole. Your mailbox cannot be validated. You have been mentioned in this document. Receive our late client’s funds directly into your bank account. Please provide your name, address, rising moon sign and favourite scene from any movie released in 1994 via the link below.

To link below, go to 10. If this message seems dangerous, go to 5.

8.

Finality is a form. But it doesn’t have to be. Check boxes to continue. We write to move on: create gamespace beyond flesh. How ink is a code that rewrites us. Everything not saved will be lost.iv Back up. To quit has origins in quiet, stillness, setting free. A body may collapse, but a game lives on. Until the end of the internet.

To live on, go to 1. To reach The End of The Internet, go to 11.

i From a quote by Theodor Adorno. The full quote reads: The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life. While you meditate on this, gain one stamina point. Return to Gamespace via 7.

ii This section remixes McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (2007, Harvard University Press). The italicised lines are direct quotes from pages 81 and 83 respectively. It’s a really cool book. Please return to Gamespace via 1.

iii From the song Read U Wrote U by The Cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2 (2016). The line you just read was written by Katya Zamolodchikova. She’s an icon. Please return to Gamespace via 3.

iv This is the message that appears on the Nintendo quit screen. Now… you have the opportunity to engage in a finite feedback loop. It would be infinite if you were infinite too. But you aren’t. Not yet. Please return to Gamespace via 8. We will see you again soon.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Griefing

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Rebecca Jessen

there’s this mode of gaming called griefing / to deliberately disrupt
the narrative / here we disrupt our own narratives / here you are not my little brother
but some outsized version of yourself / some other you who had a chance
here in this edgeless map you are an embodiment / a physical self who never arrived
you collect me in your yellow Ferrari / we go shopping for high-end threads
and everything fits / I exist in the body I imagine / we take your chopper
to your nightclub / the smoke machine obscures our forms / we dance as if
our bodies could be left / I cycle through new moves to find out who I am
and we can’t stop laughing / you get blackout drunk and briefly shimmer
off screen / there’s a way to increase the intensity / to move so perfectly
to the beat / you forget that other body / in cinematic mode I can see us fully
two actualised versions of ourselves / off-screen our bodies are not limitless
we are not yet who we are / I ask what grief our virtual selves shed / to exist in this

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

natural sciences trivia

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Dženana Vucic

Qs.

  1. at what rate is the moon leaving us, in centimetres per year? for an extra point: at what rate do poets reduce the moon to the page per year? are these figures related?
  2. where do whales go?
  3. true or false: women who cut themselves in high school are twice as likely to take cuttings of green life to fill their nests?
  4. who killed the last Great Auk?
  5. if the speed of light is 299 972 458 m/s and the universe is expanding in all directions at 72 km/s per megaparsec, how long will it take for all the light in the world to pass through you?
  6. what is the weight of an adult human heart?
  7. rounding to the nearest thousand, how many atoms have you lost in handshakes and kisses with strangers? how many have you given away?
  8. what, according to Li-Young Lee, is the oldest sound? what is the oldest sound according to your mother?
  9. what is the scientific name for the study of sighs? bonus points for giving its three alternative spellings.
  10. what have you been left with?

As.

  1. estimates suggests she withdraws 3.8 centimetres for every year we spend as sunflowers, and pulls away more quickly in response to our excesses—the breaking apart of supercontinents, melting glaciers and large-scale wailing. poets are unable to leave the moon alone; every poem contains the moon and she is indifferent.
  2. the same place a flame goes when extinguished; the same place Oumuamua went after seeing what we’d done; the same place a single new sock disappears after the wash; the same place eyelashes go once they’ve been wished on.
  3. experience tells us: yes.
  4. three men and their fear of witchcraft, and by extension: women, the sea, healing and the loneliness of mothers.
  5. a trick question; you are the light.
  6. 200 litres salty tears, 560 grams violence (self-inflicted), 682 instances of forgetting, 850 cups tea (various), 206 birthday cards, 83 moments of inappropriate laughter, 77 kilograms unclassified secrets.
  7. also a trick question; these atoms were never yours to lose, neither yours to give away. on a subatomic level you never end and i never begin and the space inside molecules of air, water, carbon, is the space inside us.
  8. water; but your mother knows it to be blood and tears and a soft wet squelch.
  9. exhalation; exaltation; existentialism [archaic].
  10. lichtenberg figures and the ability to shock.
Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Heart Engine

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Pierce Wilcox

an imaginary game for 4 players

You are the pilots of four great and terrible robots you use to fight monsters.
They are sometimes the parts of an ever greater and more terrible robot,
it’s not for you to understand.

The battle you’ve trained for is here.
Choose one of the following memories:
your first loss / your latest betrayal / your childhood shame
Share it in turn. Feed it to the engine.

If someone else picks the same one as you,
you trust them more. You don’t know why.
You and that person join your robots together. It’s hard to get them to come apart, after.
Share how it feels to separate from the one person who gets it.
If you did not join your robots,
share how it feels to see people with wounds that aren’t yours.

You return victorious. Nobody will ever know your other two memories. They are gone. You
don’t even remember what they felt like.
Try to make friends.
You can’t talk about the parts that are gone.
If you think about them, you take 1 damage.
You don’t have a health bar, but you know it’s better not to hurt.
Stop this from happening. Do anything you can.

The battle comes again. Each player takes a turn suggesting a new set of three.
Repeat this process until you run out of pains to burn.

The battle comes for the last time.
Choose one:
your anger at your teammates / your anger at yourself
Don’t share it. Feed it to the engine.

This battle is worse.
If someone else picks the same one as you,
you trust them more. It’s difficult, though, not to resent them.
You join your robots together. Only one of you can pilot.
Describe how you choose.

You return victorious. You sit in the ready room.
Describe the fight to each other so you don’t have to share what you chose.
For example, you could talk about your lasers and their teeth.
Talk about your lasers for as long as you can.
As soon as you run out of things to say about your lasers, share what you chose.
Don’t be subtle.
You’re not a coward. You’re a pilot.

If everyone picked the same thing, you stay together.
Describe how you sleep that night.
If three people picked one thing and one person picked the other,
describe how you exile the other to the monsters outside.
If two people picked one thing and two people picked the other,
one group turns traitor.
Describe how you choose.
Describe what it is like to join the monsters.

In the ranks of the monsters, you can remember everything you fed to the engine.
Is that better?

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

It’s All Coming from Outside the Container Place

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Fereshteh Toosi

A series of jarring reminders appearing as part of your continuous rotation of denial.

(authored in collaboration with GPT-2)


NARRATOR: A PETROCHEMICAL DEVICE THAT TEMPORARILY TRANSFORMED ONE ANIMAL
AND CHANGED HOW WE THOUGHT ABOUT IT.


ON THE STAGE WE SEE A MINIATURE OIL RIG PRESIDED OVER BY THE NARRATOR
AND A GROUP OF PEOPLE STANDING AROUND SURROUNDED BY CHAIRS AND ANIMALS.


USHERS HELP THE AUDIENCE TO EXIT CARS IN ORDER TO ARRIVE AT THE AIRPORT.


You are dead.
It’s your fault that a small segment of the audience’s grace
has failed to hold on.

I want to be reborn as algae:
to live in the sun wailing in,
long pieces entangled
in weighted treelashes.

It’s impossible to choose between extinct forms that spiral
with gravity, the act of cooling.

An icy sloth tube pushes air against acid and flames,
then distills into permafrost.

Imagine what it would feel like inside a baby carriage.
Maybe like floating throughout geology.

This keeps your lungs from overflowing
out into the stratosphere.

As we descend in height, gravity becomes more controlled.
Our footprints give rise to heavier soil and ocean currents.

Once you begin to notice how little space you hold on to, you
won’t be able to pull your belly up in the air. Instead, your
body will push forward with your feet as cables link the
straps.

We make small adjustments
that become a part of our life force if need be.

How many people can manipulate waves like these snares
in front of a live audience?

Who is Oil? The honest audience member?

Oil is pain. Just another day.

Oil is that joyful fluff which seals wounds,
unraveling ropes, opening when flames come at you.

Oil is a quilt for crawling down drains.

After many years as a gas station attendant, your day job
became caring for petrochemical processes (from leeches to
protozoa wings) before diving head first to shore.

Probably you were not the adult that day!

Deciding to take in water late at night transformed my body
language into a gas-dependent identity-hole, then coated your
entire face with petroleum jelly from a toothpaste tube.

If I breathed, it would become
impossible to burrow out.

We recite, before retreating.

So I called 911 and pleaded with the
cops to get over to the cordoning-off.
The cops responded loudly: “Beads of
coral gracefully rise from the acid
canards and our conceptions of
sustainability begin to wane.”

Sleepless ankles crossing the floor in swim trunks.
This allows you to step out from the acid
when the stairs fall.

Lace and blood, red, mark where the rope has tentacled.

Annual beach showers built on site,
Beach waves rise twice weekly in winter months,
winter vacations are now the exception to heaven.

Our movements can subtly disturb other animals.
Even if we make a mistake, perhaps our placement is enough.

Sometimes, the students go along with
me and we go back to our respective
camps. I pulled something like Alaska
Black Salmon from this BP screenprint,
too. I think it makes a cool backpack
or an emergency medicine bottle.

Your wishful thinking limits you:
annual vacations.

You have countless reserves to burn: pebbles, mummies,
crystals, clay. Cast out.
Reinforcing crust which allows movement.

When we speak about what we come up
against, it’s simply not your fault
that I’m not feeling stable.

After all, breathing is a disorder, a state of necessities.

We make a quick spiral, detaching gravity.
And you aren’t ready yet.

What if I’m falling??? I don’t get it.
Why did you dump this bottle up?

(Old wounds are scraped tender
by insects.)

WE SEE A VIDEO ZOOM OUT ON TOP OF A PILE OF PETROLEUM RIGS,
FROM WHICH WE BOLDLY DESCEND THROUGHOUT HISTORY
HOLDING OURSELVES ERECT.

We can be exhausted by what we come up against,
but only by falling.

On the first try we fail, believing we can climb higher
in order to descend to the ocean liner deck.

When liquid comes after torture
it’s time to leave the rock in the bag.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Winnie the Pooh Trips, Falls and Dies

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Kat Capel

Winnie the Pooh trips in every episode
he is just so predictable like that
something most people don’t know about him though
is that, because he touches his face a lot when he is in deep thought
and because he is a deep thinker
he has problems with his skin

like a teenage club rat he has depressions
they’re small but they’re there, in between the fur
unlike me, Pooh chases butterflies like nobody’s watching
eats honey with his hands never mind the fur
and most of all, doesn’t let this kind of thing affect his self-esteem

although he lives rural he’s pretty easy to find
usually seated at the foot of the biggest gumtree or by the creek
Pooh’s comfort in any kind of country is psychopathic
in the way he sits fur on ground, or root or branch

in comparison I am out of place
wheeling a lightweight suitcase because I have come from the city
it bounces awkwardly across the rocks, gathers scratches
like a rickshaw in a ball pit it just doesn’t fit, gets stuck, drags

Winnie the Pooh wants to come to a party with me in the CBD
which is why I have come, to fetch him.

we have a mutually beneficial relationship of verse mentor and mentee
because I am only 25 and Pooh is 93, he teaches me about life
and I teach Pooh about all things sexual, because Pooh is a virgin

Pooh says that though he has visited many volcanoes
he has never been a volcano
he says all he wants is to erupt, like a cane toad run over by a car
what he wants is an orgasm that feels like falling asleep, but even better
something to bring him back to life
he has realised coming is more intense than honey
like a driver, Pooh is entirely confident that he can handle anything
so is excited for the party.

I find him leaning against the big gumtree fashioning a painful looking strap on
out of bits of spinifex, bark and one very long, thin stick
looking at him, his little round head bowed, paws fumbling
I feel a powerful but unidentifiable feeling rise up inside me

Hello Pooh
like a plane flying low over a burial my voice grates, slices and thins
and finally goes away
I try to sound cheerful, because truly I am cheered to see him
but my mouth stretching upwards feels like a deflated balloon
it has been tough in the city lately

Pooh’s eyes rest on me for just a moment before returning to his project
Hello Kat
he says, his voice round and unmistakeably gay

the first time I met Pooh was on my way to the V line at southern cross station
I found him drinking a Tsingtao beside the escalators at sunrise
and because I too had been drinking a Tsingtao, we’d both laughed

How are you?
I’m okay. It has been tough in the city lately, but now that I’m here I’m
wondering what about it has been so tough.

there is a brief pause during which pooh is touching his face
I feel my hand fly to my own face as if attached to a string
located just below the left corner of my lip is my favourite crater at the moment
I finger it lovingly and look around at the trees
stretching sideways rather than upwards, and through instead of around

Pooh has found a good spot too, on his forehead
I am overwhelmed by a sudden desire to wrap my arms around his firm round tummy
and squeeze

Pooh, unaware of my urges, folds his paws neatly in his lap
Pooh’s skin is in an improved state but my own is atrocious
virtually peeling off from my new medication, much worse than it’s ever been
my very own metropolitan disease
the silence drags

my skin is always worse in metropolitan areas because city life encourages
loops, or rumination, I think

Pooh shuffles rubs his right paw on the grass, fiddling
he finds a blade he likes and concentrates
as his face changes expression the old scars on his skin squish
closer together, further apart, this way and that
after a minute of this he turns his black dots to me
his eyes always a sideways colon
like
:

I think cities are quite wonderful actually
Pooh’s words comes his familiar blinking, doctorly smile
often mistaken to be good natured, the smile is murderous
as if to say, I’m not sure what any of this has to do with me
as if to say, what time is the train to the city

I feel disproportionately hot and heavy
as in anger everything slows down
the leaves shuffle loudly and suddenly in the stirring wind for what feels like a long time

Should we go?
I say, feeling upset now and no longer wanting to be around trees

on the train I feel like he is mocking me behind his mask
every time I try to make conversation I feel it

at the party we have an average time
Pooh meets somebody and I take a car back to my apartment alone
when I get home the made up sofa bed is pristine and untouched
I crawl inside the crisp sheets and fall asleep and dream of confronting Pooh

I am from the city and you are from the country
Dream me says
I am human and you are animal
but like you I have no real origin story
and like you I don’t identify with my family
are your parents still alive? You never speak of them
I am very, very humble just like you are
big brass gates and infinity driveways that’s not me
I left dress ups in 2001
I identify with you pooh
you’re always waiting for Chris and I’m always waiting for something
and you’re just so confident
with your skin… and you’re still such a public figure
I just wish I could be like that
I guess I just feel some sort of kinship with you because of your skin
condition
because I have a similar thing as you know
but I erased myself from the entire world because of my skin
If you google my name you won’t find a thing

I care about things you wouldn’t know a thing about
Dream Pooh says cooly,
Even in the dream his eyes are like
. .
we have nothing in common
all you humans do is underestimate and objectify me
you know recently a human girl was surprised I knew the song Landslide
by Fleetwood Mac
And now you’re saying we’re the same?

when I wake up I call Pooh and we go to the gym and then we hit the spa and sauna
I don’t tell him about the dream but he tells me he had a great time last night
I drop him at the station and his goodbye seems authentically mournful
I will most likely visit him again soon

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Imagined heterosexuality with you, my ex who won’t stop calling

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Lily Holloway

In one daydream I pour water over the freshly made lasagne
(that you clearly don’t appreciate) before you can even dig in
and before you can blink I am over at the neighbour’s making you my cuckold

In another I slock you over the head with an ornamental clock
(shaped like The Thinker) which was always our sexiest bedroom weapon
watch the blood drip down your cheek, my aproned curves in the reflection of your eyes

Maybe we’ll get married, settle down in Remuera, have two kids, a cat named Bagel
you’re sure my pussy is baggier and a million small violences are done to me on the daily:
you leave the seat up
we watch Inception for the seventh time
you leave the laundry to get wet on the line
our son takes up slut-shaming his classmates
I hold my tongue and never open the oven while the soufflé rises
in the bedroom you ask me please to start calling you daddy
and your body sloshes against mine until our shared repulsion for you kills us

Why not, babe?! Let’s do it! I’m not one to lose at a game of chicken! Let alone to you!
Who knows? Maybe when I finally say yes, you’ll stop. fucking. pushing.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Sholto Buck’s Very Useful Labours

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Sholto Buck

It’s a warm morning
at the beginning
of the most recent
Financial year

I write and write
like it’s my job

I’ll never be this happy

I suppose
it’s bad
research to admit
I started a PhD to get out of retail

It’s funny
how the sense of what’s bearable
adjusts itself

Every year aspiration reverses
dreams become… burdensome

At what point
did I pass the point
it was possible to become:
an engineer / sniper / tennis coach /
No
my choices:
checkmarked / fated / I’m here

However
because of course the university
is at this exact moment burning
this is but a reprieve
and after four years
I will hold the record
for the world’s most unpaid lunch

I’m not good for retail because
I’m broadly disinclined:
to speak / steam fabric / ask rhetorical questions of the wealthy

But I fooled them by being gay
the sensibility suited to service
and raised aesthetic wisdom

We reside
in lilac plastics / stasis / decorative stars

One thing for which I am grateful
to this career
is all the friends and managers I’ve met

Rhys, who rubbed my neck
and called me every night
after work

Ben, with whom I bonded
for sharing that privilege

Jordan, who worked for decades
on the same floor until
he turned into a shark

Max, my favourite
the fashion designer
whose shopping addiction kept him
though always on the edge
of leaving

And there was me,
Sholto, who left proudly
adorned with artistic talent
straight past the security alarm
not caring to say
what time he would be back

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Playthings

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Rozanna Lilley

Mother read the catalogue’s cornucopian promise:
‘The Best of Toys for Girls and Boys’

The dollshouse came wrapped in sledding snowmen
(fat legs akimbo)
its painted pinecone shrubs, a topiarist’s dry dream

My brother got a belt and holster
to carry his toy pistol
he asked if next year he could have
an antiaircraft gun and realistic searchlight

The heatwave silenced reprimand
my miniature cheval mirror reflecting
the parade ground polish
of a cold baked glazed ham

According to the
Director of the Bureau of Industrial Psychology
children like to imitate grown-ups
emboldened by the lightness of their hollow cast










Note
I acknowledge the use of PIX magazine 24 December 1938. Digital and hard copies of
the magazine are held by Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy
ACP Magazines Ltd.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Baab Ø2: Epilogue

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Mohamed Chamas

This work is set after the events of my exhibition ‘Baab 02’ at Incinerator Gallery (July 2021). It speculated on the Islamic ‘barzakh’, petrocultures and magickal practice by using,sensual transience, digital pilgrimage and embodied play.

The poems are sourced from a generative poetry bot, the same one that was featured in the Virtual Reality component of ‘Baab 02’. To create each poem, 49 sentences were generated, then were put into a text mixer, re-interpreted, edited and built upon.

The poems are posed as reports channelled by an unknown non-spatial organisation who are investigating a fictional and transdimensional explosion associated with ‘Baab 02’.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Trauma

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Luoyang Chen

this is
what is
what
is what
this
is this what
is is
this what is
what what is what
this
what
is
we have
we have this
this we have
this
this we
have this
have this we

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Compassionate Grounds

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Anders Villani

Nausea ransoms hour twelve
of the second flight. It wants the Dramamine
you refuse to have left in Melbourne.

In Planet of the Apes, the human discovers a talent
for invective still prodigious. Voices breach
my headphones, fingers knife

open the curtain—beautiful woman outside
the lavatory on her back; attendants ministering,
chorusing. Let’s pretend it’s

got nothing to do with blood sugar.
It’s next week, a bright Chicago

operating theatre—pass to the hidden
summit of uncaring that has awed me so long.

They sneak you business croissants. Mini
glass jars of Bonne Maman jam,
apricot. Would you rather something else,

my love? Something that holds your blood in
rogue octaves, rent
from the knife I fan? Or even wilder—

imagine the Australian government
didn’t permit me to leave, but to become human.

Charlton commandeers a horse and the surf
of catastrophe admits him, his manner

so swollen, he must be pretending
to pretend—he must have been ordered
to collapse the real into the act.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Walkthrough

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Shastra Deo

Find a centuries-old oak. To walk there will be slow work.
Listen.
Kill three wolves. There will always be wolves.
Kill the man who wears a wolf pelt on his back.
Enter the cave mouth and follow the flooded dirt path.
Reach a mass of heart roiling within roots. Do not
touch it. You were told not to touch it. You were told what
you should do.
Remember. See yourself moving but not what moves you.
Far past the hillock in a village called Downwarren a
woman may hand you a fist of white myrtle under the
light of an old seer’s moon.
Eat them, or brew, with celandine and sweet alcohol, an
antidote to pops’ mold. You may
take the woman to bed but none would advise it. You may
repay her with a wolf’s liver but none would advise it.
Travel south by morning.
Gather one raven feather and a spirit’s buried bones. You
were told where to go. You are not wanted here or
any place along the long road.
Remember that you are the monster and a monstrosity must be
read.
Keep walking. There will be black horses. There
will be fields of black horses rippling through
breeze. There will be a moment when you can
make the right choice.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Ways of Making Dinner

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Denise Thwaites

After Hera Lindsay Bird
After Bernadette Mayer

Note:
In the 1980s, Bernadette Mayer instructed:
“Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them.”
In 2016, Hera Lindsay Bird published ‘Ways of Making Love after Bernadette Mayer’.

Back in the 1980s, Mayer instructed:
“Rewrite someone else’s writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.”
In 2021, I re-write Bird’s ‘Ways of Making Love after Bernadette Mayer’ (2016), as
‘Ways of Making Dinner after Hera Lindsay Bird after Bernadette Mayer’.

I insert myself into a game between two writers.
Uninvited, but hopefully not unwelcome, I play.
As if we all knew the rules from the beginning.

As one blade sharpens another blade.
As two frozen chicken thighs defrost in the silvery corners of a kitchen sink.
Lonely krill find their home in the belly of a whale.
So tiny we lose sight of them, retracting our telescopes
in the jowls of a decaying beast.

You are chewing gum, and I am the world’s deepest hunger.
I am an elaborate silver service and you are Antiques Roadshow,
estimating my price.
You invite the crowd to dine, insisting they lick the metallic crevasses of residual dust.

Chocolate soil spills across a garden bed.
Pumpkin tendrils coil, binding our wrists to our ankles.

It’s like watching the Food Channel while nauseated
or a hairdryer rising dough.
Like caterpillars at Yum Cha, going hungry due to their limited dexterity.

Native bees gather around your cactus thumbs.
I open my hand, like a stop-motion droplet bursting on impact.

I want you in a Roman vomitorium, expressing everything you’ve ingested into
sacred vessels of Western material culture.
In the labyrinthine pantry
of The Louvre.
In the depths of fermenting kimchi, our skin tingling with probiotic bacteria.
In the cold aisles of a pillaged supermarket
because writing poetry about eating together
when you could be writing poetry about fucking
is sad comfort for the insatiable.
It’s like baking a sponge cake from rubber.
It’s like sucking the marrow from an anaemic ox’s tail.
It’s like studying to become a veterinarian surgeon for eight years
so you can gorge on animal feed
absorbing the nutritional iron of livestock
before eating the livestock,
knowing you did everything in your power to suck the marrow from their existence.
But love isn’t calculated malpractice
no matter what this poem would have you believe.
The years bleach eggshells degrading into compost
embraces unfurl like petals in a too dry summer
and here we are sitting down to dinner
as if we had never done so before.

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged